Edited by Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman

Book overview. This edited collection explores theoretical and practical questions about multimodal, digital production through lenses of rhetoric/composition, digital writing studies, English studies, and the humanities.

Not Your Mother's Argument

Morgan Gresham and Roxanne Kirkwood Aftanas

Abstract. This chapter explores how identity and expectations change audience responses to our work as scholars. Using our own compositions as a point of departure, we argue that authors cannot use the master's tools of traditional argument to look at the new work of composition scholarship. As our discipline transitions to new compositions, we see the increasing expectation of a "second shift" of work that requires remediation into traditional argument if our work is to be viable. We push against this expectation, using our digital compositions to create feminist identities and scholarship.

As we sat in one of the sessions at the 2008 Watson
Conference, a question was posed about writing with video or video
arguments. After viewing a particular series of video examples, we were
asked if these examples constituted a scholarly argument. The sense of our
room was yes, these are scholarly arguments, but the question remained whether these would be considered scholarly arguments by our disciplinary
colleagues. The ensuing discussion haunts me. Our disciplinary
colleagues want to see how we have built our argument, want to have
their own entrance into the texts we create. Implicit in this argument
is a protestant approach: I cannot believe you until you show me. If this is true, and if we agree that it is true for much of
our discipline, then we as scholars/authors must consider building
meta-frameworks for the new digital compositions we create. Our digital
arguments are not persuasive, are not scholarly enough, to stand on
their own. Instead, we should compose the argument in our chosen medium,
and then after we have done that, we should postmodernly deconstruct
the argument into its component parts so that our colleagues can see
that the digital composition was structurally sound. How’s that again?
Build and un-build it so that I can see if I would build it the same
way?

We
believe that knowledge is created though interaction, because for these
authors—Morgan and Roxanne—interaction is usually in the form of
conversation. We invite you to interact with our ideas by exploring this
site however you like. We did not choose to create a linear argument.
Rather, we collected representations of the conversation(s) we have with
each other in an effort to capture the real work of theorizing that
happens daily.

"It
is therefore not uncommon for innovative rhetorics to be characterized
as less than‘ rigorous’—though, in fact, boundary rhetorics may help us
define ‘rigor’ by interrogating conventions that have gone unchallenged
for decades.” (Debra Journet, 1993, p. 510)